As someone who works in tech, I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already.

Part of my job is to oversee and arrange in some capacity for licensing of digital products, especially office 365, and I can count the number of people who have a copilot subscription on one hand, out of nearly, if not more than 1000 users across various clients.

I know some are using competing products, mainly chat GPT, and I don’t always have visibility to that, but still… The rate of adoption and the speed at which all of this is being developed and invested into… Does not bode well.

Depends on the type of fiber and all that. It can be insanely complex.

But this is possible, yes.

You are the subset of people who happen to be in a situation where they’re working as they should. I’m going to guess that you’re not in North America, and live somewhere with 240v power outlets.

In any country that uses 120v, usually it’s split phase power, and if your powerline adapters are sharing a phase with something that’s inductive or crossing the split in the phase, generally they’re going to be rubbish. So you basically need a degree in electrical engineering to figure out what circuits are on what side of the split phase, and what is on each circuit that may be an inductive load, and could interfere, just for them to perform like they should.

There’s a whole lot more to it, and I’m simplifying a lot here, but that’s the overview of the problem.

With UK power circuits, there are fewer breakers and everything is fed from a single phase of 240v. That makes it much more likely that you’ll have a good experience with powerline. Just have to avoid the circuit with stuff like your air conditioner (if you have one) and stuff like the fridge, and generally you do quite well with powerline.

Ethernet is still better tho. Heh.

This is the information I couldn’t really squeeze in without side tracking my entire point.

There are “good” extenders, that use different channels/radios, but the cheap ones people buy are not those.

This is correct. You might want to look into a point of entry filter for MoCA, since you don’t want to share your Internet with your neighbors.

Last time I looked, which was a while ago, I couldn’t really find any, but hopefully that’s been sorted out in your area.

Basically the point of entry filter stops the signals from the MoCA link from crossing, so you would want to put that between the outside box and the first splitter.

Wi-Fi is convenient more than anything. You just have to know the right passphrase and as long as you are in range, you can get in… In most cases.

When it comes to WiFi, I’m a fan of many smaller and lower power access points vs a few high powered ones. This is rarely the case in residential situations though. Most people buy a single, high powered Wi-Fi in the form of a all-in-one wireless router, and call it a day, then almost exclusively use Wi-Fi and wonder why it sucks, then go buy a newer more powerful unit once one is available.

My motto is: wire when you can, wireless when you have to. Devices like laptops, tablets and phones, usually do not have Ethernet built in, or are too mobile to make it practical to use. Meanwhile anything that doesn’t move, like TVs, desktops, etc, need a wire run once, and it will work perfectly until the building falls over.

That’s a lot of return on the investment of running the cable once.

I usually prefer all home runs (everything going back to a central point) but networking is diverse, so using a cable to get to an area, then using a switch to serve that area is entirely valid. Just don’t Daisy chain too many switches or your going to have a bad time. Whether that link is copper, fiber, MoCA/coax, doesn’t matter… As long as it’s reliable and fast.

In any case, I have at least 8 access points serving my home, and they need to be moved, since I still have one spot that’s a dead zone.

This is the way.

Alien can be boiled down to simply meaning “foreign”. As in, not coming from the wire bundle that is used for the connection.

Crosstalk is the term usually used for interference coming from other pairs in the same bundle, which should be minimal due to the electrical/magnetic properties associated with twisted pair.

Alien interference is any inference from an outside source, usually by inducing a current on the Ethernet pairs, that shouldn’t be present. Usually this results in corruption of the data in transit or a failure to sync (and establish a connection at all).

No extra terrestrial interference was meant to be implied; though, I’m not excluding the extra terrestrials from creating interference; I’m sure if such beings exist and are here, they could interfere, but that wasn’t the intention of my statement.

Alien inference is a very common term in wireline networking. I’m surprised you haven’t heard it.

You’re quick.

Thanks for the assist. This is what I’m referring to.

As a network guy: Ethernet over power lines can be fine, but you basically need to be an electrician, and have a working knowledge of how powerline Ethernet works before you can get there.

Even if you do, or stumble into a working setup by accident, you can absolutely end up with all kinds of bad things happening because power lines are notoriously bad with crosstalk and EMI, both on the wire and emitted from it.

If you absolutely cannot do rj45/Ethernet runs, and WiFi isn’t viable for whatever reason (or even if it is), look into MoCA. Thank me later.

It won’t cost you any more than powerline, and you’ll get a cleaner signal, more consistent performance, and overall a better experience.

In order of preference, I prefer the following connection options:

• fiber
• Ethernet
• MoCA
• Wi-Fi
• powerline

Fiber, not because it’s faster or better (there are many ways it’s actually worse than Ethernet), but because it’s almost impossible to interfere with, unless someone physically disconnects the cable (or breaks/cuts it). As long as the line is protected from damage, it will give the most consistent performance.

Ethernet, more robust than fiber in terms of physical disability, can be faster at propagating data (the time it takes to get from one end of the cable to the other), but only works over relatively short runs (100m or less, by spec), and it’s susceptible to alien interference and crosstalk. However, it is far more rugged than fiber.

MoCA is half duplex but shares a lot of the benefits of Ethernet. The main improvement here is that coax is commonly present in most homes already, while Ethernet is relatively uncommon in homes, so many homes are already wired in a way that works with MoCA.

Wi-Fi is also half duplex, it can go faster than Ethernet under the right conditions (which are almost impossible to achieve in real world conditions). Propagation is as fast as Ethernet but it has more overhead, and it is much more prone to interference from other Wi-Fi networks or other things operating on the same, unlicensed, bands.

Powerline should only be considered if all of the other options are disqualified for some reason.

Also, anyone using wifi extenders (not talking about mesh or anything, just actual Wi-Fi extenders), should probably not be doing that. Wi-Fi extenders are often just retransmitting the packets on the same wifi channel, which dramatically cuts the available bandwidth. You’ll end up with a stronger connection, but a much slower one.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.

You convinced me, it definitely didn’t happen. I was hallucinating again.

I work IT support. I’ve seen the dialog about 1000 times.

It’s crazy how many people prefer a browser that’s not edge.

They seem to have removed it in Windows 11, and even might have disabled it in later versions of 10. Idk, everything I’m dealing with now in terms of new setups are Windows 11.

I laughed at Microsoft a lot when they basically made Windows 10 beg people to try edge.

You tried to change your default and it was like, this isn’t recommended! And you’re like, idgaf change the default, and Windows is like, are you sure? Yes! But edge can save battery power. Are you really sure?

Fuck off edge. Change the default.

In my experience, Plex struggles with the same. Depends on the series.

I don’t. There’s just a nontrivial number of people I care about that use Plex that don’t know enough about technology to handle something like jellyfin.

Losing years of watched data isn’t great, but ultimately it’s small potatoes.

A big part of the reason I wanted to set up Plex to begin with, was so that my friends and family didn’t have to waste their time downloading the stuff that all of us want to watch.

They don’t demand anything, I want them to be able to use it because I care about those people. If switching to jellyfin is too difficult for the non-techs I care about, then I’ll keep rolling with Plex.

I’m not sure I can switch. I have too many friends linked to my server and a decade-ish of watched data.

I know many people watch from TV apps and Chromecasts and I don’t know if there’s an app for every TV brand for jellyfin or emby or whatever.

People watch from all sorts of weird devices. I got push back when I forced SSL because at least one person had a TV so old that it didn’t support doing SSL for Plex. It took me a week to drill it into their brain that I’m not going to change it back and to go buy literally anything to make it work (Chromecast type thing). I think their ended up buying a Roku.

This is just the brainpower that most of the people I share with, have. They just want easy. I do all the hard work in the background and their life is easy.

I can’t imagine how many would have a fit if I forced them off Plex. Jellyfin looks cool and all, but it’s unlikely I’ll be able to move anytime soon.

They’ve “streamlined” your experience.

Thank you for your candor.

The little bits I’ve seen of it are almost putting an emphasis on the platformer part of the game. Very vertical, jump from one small platform to another small platform… So what you’ve said tracks.

I’m used to platformers being like… Super Mario world.

I just thought it was relevant to the discussion.

Not arguing whether it’s good music.

The fact that these chucklefucks worship money is my point. They put money as more important than life itself.

That’s the one I was quoting. So they’re not wrong.